This collection of original essays uses contemporary theory to examine Renaissance writers' reworking of Ovid's texts in order to analyze the strategies in the construction of the early modern discourses of gender, sexuality, and writing.

This persuasive book analyses the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts at transgendered ventriloquism that are indebted to Ovid's work, she argues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This vividly original book makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and Metamorphoses. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid’s poetry stimulated the vernacular imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid’s English protégés replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet’s distinctive and frequently remarked ’bookishness’ in their own adaptations of his works. Focusing on the postclassical discourses that Ovid’s poetry stimulated, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book engages with vibrant current debates about the book as material object as it explores the Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies that informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books. Further, author Lindsay Ann Reid’s discussions of Ovidianism provide alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception, adaptation, and imitatio. While there is a sizeable body of published work on Ovid and Chaucer as well as on the ubiquitous Ovidianism of the 1590s, there has been comparatively little scholarship on Ovid’s reception between these two eras. Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book begins to fill this gap between the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare by dedicating attention to the literature of the early Tudor era. In so doing, this book also contributes to current discussions surrounding medieval/Renaissance periodization.

Dictatorship and Politics presents the first major study of General Juan Vicente G mez's regime in Venezuela from 1908 to 1935 and the efforts of G mez's enemies to overthrow him during his twenty-seven years in power. In this reappraisal of the G mez regime, Brian S. McBeth demonstrates that G mez's success in withstanding opponents' attacks was not only the result of his political acumen and ruthless methods of oppression. The political disagreements, personal rivalries, financial difficulties, occasional harassment by foreign powers, and at times plain bad luck of his opponents, usually in exile, were important contributing factors in the failure of their plots to overthrow him. In examining the opposition to the G mez dictatorship, McBeth also intentionally removes the politics of oil from the center stage of the regime's foreign relations and instead focuses on the tolerance and intolerance by foreign governments of the exiles' activities. This monumental work of scholarship encompasses political correspondence, personal memoirs, newspapers, British and U.S. sources, and various public and private archives in Venezuela. Historians, as well as political scientists working on themes related to dictatorships and opposition, will find the book of interest. "Dictatorship and Politics is a fascinating revisionist study of the long regime of legendary Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente G mez. Brian McBeth provides a fresh analysis of a twenty-seven year autocracy that challenges the conventional depiction of a largely stable and uneventful era. To the contrary, he demonstrates that it was a period that bubbled over with revolutionary turmoil and family conflict. This exhaustively researched monograph is a valuable contribution to the fields of Latin American authoritarianism, Venezuelan political history, and oil politics in the era of gunboat diplomacy. Readers will quickly be drawn in to this shadowy world of power, revolt, and intrigue." --Winfield Burggraaff, University of Missouri "This book makes an original and important contribution to the study of Venezuela's politics and international relations during the period when Juan Vicente G mez ruled the nation (1908-1935). The massive research underlying this work is without parallel in the existing scholarly literature for this period of Venezuelan history. It will be the standard work on its subject for years to come." --Douglas Yarrington, Colorado State University

The first study of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses, as inherently visual literature, explaining his pervasive importance in our visual media.

Taking cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the volume’s subject, this exciting collection of essays offers a reassessment of Shakespeare’s erotic and Ovidian mythology within classical and continental aesthetic contexts. Through extensive examination of mythological visual and textual material, scholars explore the transmission and reinvention of Ovidian eroticism in Shakespeare’s plays to show how early modern artists and audiences collectively engaged in redefining ways of thinking pleasure. Within the collection’s broad-ranging investigation of erotic mythology in Renaissance culture, each chapter analyses specific instances of textual and pictorial transmission, reception, and adaptation. Through various critical strategies, contributors trace Shakespeare’s use of erotic material to map out the politics and aesthetics of pleasure, unravelling the ways in which mythology informs artistic creation. Received acceptions of neo-platonic love and the Petrarchan tensions of unattainable love are revisited, with a focus on parodic and darker strains of erotic desire, such as Priapic and Dionysian energies, lustful fantasy and violent eros. The dynamics of interacting tales is explored through their structural ability to adapt to the stage. Myth in Renaissance culture ultimately emerges not merely as near-inexhaustible source material for the Elizabethan and Jacobean arts, but as a creative process in and of itself.